Hell of a week, gang. Sudden death in the family, moving to a new house, all that jazz. But here is page! Huzzah.
More later.
for Rene Magritte
The carpenter’s made a hole
In the parlor floor, and I’m standing
Staring down into it now
At four o’clock in the evening,
As Schliemann stood when his shovel
Knocked on the crowns of Troy.
A clean-cut sawdust sparkles
On the grey, shaggy laths,
And here is a cluster of shavings
From the time when the floor was laid.
They are silvery-gold, the color
Of Hesperian apple-parings.
Kneeling, I look in under
Where the joists go into hiding.
A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
Where its parallels will meet.
The radiator-pipe
Rises in middle distance
Like a shuttered kiosk, standing
Where the only news is night.
Here’s it’s not painted green,
As it is in the visible world.
For God’s sake, what am I after?
Some treasure, or tiny garden?
Or that untrodden place,
The house’s very soul,
Where time has stored our footbeats
And the long skein of our voices?
Not these, but the buried strangeness
Which nourishes the known:
That spring from which the floor-lamp
Drinks now a wilder bloom,
Inflaming the damask love-seat
And the whole dangerous room.
– Richard Wilbur
photo by Jon Feinstein (site)
——-
Generally the poems I pick for the occasional Monday appearance are connected to something very literal in my life. It’s a way for me to process happenings (from the silly to the significant) and recontextualize them however I feel the need. Sometimes I know exactly the poem I need to post; just as often I simply type “[topic] poem” into the search field and keep sifting until the right thing presents itself, which it invariably does. The oracle of Delphi had nothing on Googlemancy.
But, the literal-ness: this past weekend I ripped up, often with considerable violence, a lot of old carpeting and linoleum in the home I’ll be officially moving into this month, to prepare it for brand new floors. I am not designed to take such things unmetaphorically, and the bare board that the work exposed feels parallel to all the getting-started going on in my life at the moment, and to the “buried strangeness” that is the mysterious continuity of self in the face of flux.
Behold! I am reinstalled in my life here in Portland and almost out from under the massive backlog of orders, business chores and work; tomorrow I might even unpack the suitcase. Luckily for my sanity, I get to ease back in with another one of these handy chapter transition images. Next week we’ll have Luther and the library and hijinks will ensue. Hurray!
Then the week after that I’ll be due for another round of page notes, although they might be a bit scanty given the hunting interlude. (I do promise I’ll post links to the rabbit skinning tutorials I found on YouTube. Like a banana, gang. They peel like a damn banana.)
I’m still scrumming around for a reliable, quality printing company with good communication skills, located outside of this here continent (with prices to match). If you’ve had any good or bad experiences printing a publication in four colors with an overseas printer, please pass that information my way, so I can locate a solid vendor and have a Family Man book for sale at San Diego this year.
Hey all! I’m experiencing one of those Freelance Moments(tm) where I’m short on cash despite being heartily employed. Solution: art sale!
I traditionally hate parting with original art, particularly from comics projects and especially when it’s not an in-person sale; it’s a little easier when I design something to be given away or when I get to meet the person taking it home!
So this is your excellent chance to snag some art from me if you don’t typically make it to conventions.
Up for sale on Etsy, everything from convention doodles to original art from Click.
The scans are on the murky side so that you can see the pencil lines underneath the inking! These are slightly visible in real life so you and your friends can TELL it’s original art.
On this first dark day of the year
my daddy was born lo
these eighty-six years ago who now
has not drawn breath or held
bodily mass for some ten years and still
I have not got used to it.
My mind can still form to that chair him
whom no chair holds.
Each year on this night on the brink
of new circumference I stand and gaze
towards him, while roads careen with drunks,
and my dad who drank himself
away cannot be found. Daddy, I’m halfway
to death myself. The millenium
hurtles towards me, and the boy I bore
who bears your fire in his limbs
follows in my wake. Why can you not be
reborn all tall to me? If I raise my arms
here in the blind dark, why can you not
reach down now to hoist me up?
This heavy carcass I derive from yours is
tutelage of love, and yet each year
though older another notch I still cannot stand
to reach you, or to emigrate
from the monolithic shadow you left.
– Mary Karr
photo by Kaizoryn
Fathers and daughters have been much on my mind these last two weeks. Caring for my father has been exhausting, far more than it would seem to be when described in writing.
I’ve watched his face wax yellow with frailty and drain white with nausea and flush crimson with effort. I’ve counted off every one of his one-hundred and eighty daily leg exercises, reminded him to breathe deeply, to relax his hands, face, shoulders. I’ve seen him speechless with chill and fatigue and agony, press headphones full of jazz onto his ears so he could be at least partially disembodied, reincarnated as a coil of blue cigarette smoke rising from Dexter Gordon’s ashtray as he played ‘Round Midnight for the studio men in 1986.
I’ve estimated the angles of his knees as he gripped the arms of his chair and quaked with effort. I’ve held his hand while a stranger calmly pried thirty staples out of the flesh of his leg. I’ve filled his prescriptions for Vicodin and for a blood-thinning medication that is also a popular ingredient in most commercial rat poison. I walked down a long clinic hallway with him, step by step, stopping three times for him to catch his breath.
I’ve had him lean on my shoulder as he struggles to turn and climb back up a sequence of four steps, repeating to himself the which-leg-goes-first mantra “down with the bad, up with the good” which he had trouble remembering – painkillers render his short-term memory not unlike it had been before he quit drinking – until I pointed out to him that a man with a PhD in religion should be able to remember the phrase if he thought of it as a moral statement. Down with the bad! Up with the good! In Jesus’ name, Amen.
I have brought him an eternal cycle of icepacks and pressed them against the great angry violet swaths of bruising on his thigh, awoken him at two in the morning to remind him to take medication, cleaned the toilet after he shits, emptied his catheter bag.
I’ve helped.
I love my father. The foretaste of his mortality and potential dependency, as reflected in the aftermath of this painful but entirely elective, entirely constructive procedure, has been a bitter one. Being away from my life, wrapped in the cocoon of his condition, ceasing to exist at moments as anything other than my father’s helper, has been an alienating, distressing, and precious experience. How do other people adapt to being reshaped as caretakers of loved ones who are in permanent states of distress or disability?
For those who do so with grace, who negotiate self-negation with self-preservation, who give comfort and take it in equal measure, who are guardians of dignity and protectors of vulnerable intimacies; who perform the alchemical magic of transforming love into care,
I give thanks.